To have genuine hope in our lives, we must first open the door to it, invite it in, and then give it room to have a seat and prop up its feet for a while. When there is no place for hope, there is no room for anything else. For something new to arrive, we must first become hospitable to the new and different in our lives. We need to make room, and discard what no longer serves us.

Try this meditation for one minute today, or longer if you wish:

PAY ATTENTION to your recurring thoughts. Would they make an interesting read — or be more like a scary novel? Take some time to edit that transcript into something more positive, and see the difference it makes.

When an answer doesn’t occur to us right away, we often get uncomfortable with this emptiness. We fill these gaps with thoughts from our memory bank, destroying the mental silence that could have brought us something fresh. As we shed this vexation and learn to be at ease with the unknown, we increase exponentially the likelihood of experiencing an insight.
—Charles Kiefer, The Art of Insight

How did this meditation go for you? Share your experience with your fellow North Shore Bank employees at shorelines@northshorebank.com and you’ll be entered to win a copy of Mindfulness in Plain English, by Bhante Gunaratana.

If you’d like a daily email reminder to practice one minute of mindfulness, email us with the subject “Mindfulness reminder.”